A fixed environment may require a sound reception device that identifies sound from a desired area using a microphone array. The environment may be setup for a voice conference which includes microphones, speakers, etc., to which a sound detection device is applied.
Conventionally, voice conference devices may receive sound (i.e., speech) from various attendants participating in the voice conference, and transmit the sound received to remote voice conferences or local speaker systems for sharing the voice of one's speech or other shared sound to be replayed in real-time for others to hear.
In a conference scenario, there are often many attendants, and a voice detection device would need to identify sound associated with each of those attendants. In addition, when the attendant(s) moves, the device would have to identify the attendant moving away from a sound-pickup area. Also, when there is a noise source, such as a projector or other noise making entity, in a conference room, the voice conference device would have a focal sound-pickup area to reduce non-desirable noise from outside that area from being captured.
Conventional approaches provide microphone arrays which have multiple beamformers that define fixed steering directions for fixed beams or coverage zones for tracking beams. The directions or zones are either pre-programmed and not modifiable by the administrators or are configurable during a setup stage. Once configured, the specified configuration remains unchanged in the system during operation. When the number of persons speaking in a particular environment changes over time and/or the positions of activities changes, the result is sub-optimal since the need for a dynamic adjustment is not addressed to match those identified changes in the environment. Also, current beamforming systems deployed in microphone arrays operate mostly in an azimuth dimension, at a single fixed distance and at a small number of elevation angles.
Audio installations frequently include both microphones and loudspeakers in the same acoustic space. When the content sent to the loudspeakers includes signals from the local microphones, the potential for feedback exists. Mix-minus configurations are frequently used to maximize gain before feedback in these types of situations. “Mix-minus” generally refers to the practice of attenuating or eliminating a microphone's contribution to proximate loudspeakers. Mix-minus configurations can be tedious to set up, and are often not set up correctly or ideally.